El presente artículo describe los resultados del proyecto de investigación titulado “Plataforma TIC para propiciar la organización y colaboración de los diferentes actores del sector turístico en el Caribe Colombiano” y desarrolla  algunos conceptos sobre aplicaciones de Ontologías Web al sector turismo. Una ontología defne los términos a utilizar para describir y representar un área de conocimiento. Las ontologías son utilizadas por personas, bases  de datos y aplicaciones que necesitan compartir un dominio de información común e incluyen defniciones de  conceptos básicos del dominio, y las relaciones entre ellos. El articulo inicia con el análisis del concepto de ontologías, los componentes que lo conforman y algunos lenguajes de ontologías web frecuentemente utilizados y explica cómo se pueden aplicar las ontologías al sector turístico. El artículo fnaliza explicando cómo se construyó  un buscador de atractivos turísticos basado en ontologías.Abstract: This article describes the results of the research project entitled “ICT platform to promote the organization and collaboration of diferent actors in the tourism sector in the Colombian Caribbean” and develops some concepts about Web Ontology applications for tourism. An ontology defnes the terms to use to describe and represent an area of knowledge. Ontologies are used by people, databases and applications that need to share a common information domain and include defnitions of domain concepts and relations between them. The article begins with an analysis of the concept of ontologies, its components and some web ontology languages commonly used and explains how ontologies can be applied to the tourism sector. The article concludes by explaining how was built a seeker engine for sites based on ontologies

Messino Soza, Alexis

Tovar Garrido, Luis C.

Prospectiva

English

Universidad Autónoma del Caribe

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Prospect. Vol. 8, No. 1, Enero - Junio de 2010, págs. 87-93
Web ontology language applied to the tourism sector
Lenguajes de ontologías web aplicados al sector turístico
Ing. Alexis Messino Soza1, Ing. Luis C. Tovar Garrido1
1- Ingenieros de sistemas. Grupo de investigación IngeBioCaribe. 
amessino@unisimonbolivar.edu.co
Recibido: 20/04/2010, Aceptado: 15/06/2010
RESUMEN 
El presente artículo describe los resultados del proyecto de investigación titulado “Plataforma TIC para propiciar 
la organización y colaboración de los diferentes actores del sector turístico en el Caribe Colombiano” y desarrolla 
algunos conceptos sobre aplicaciones de Ontologías Web al sector turismo. Una ontología define los términos a 
utilizar para describir y representar un área de conocimiento. Las ontologías son utilizadas por personas, bases 
de datos y aplicaciones que necesitan compartir un dominio de información común e incluyen definiciones de 
conceptos básicos del dominio, y las relaciones entre ellos. El articulo inicia con el análisis del concepto de on-
tologías, los componentes que lo conforman y algunos lenguajes de ontologías web frecuentemente utilizados y 
explica cómo se pueden aplicar las ontologías al sector turístico. El artículo finaliza explicando cómo se construyó 
un buscador de atractivos turísticos basado en ontologías.
Palabras Clave: Ontología, OWL, Turismo, Buscador, Conocimiento.
ABSTRACT 
This article describes the results of the research project entitled “ICT platform to promote the organization and 
collaboration of different actors in the tourism sector in the Colombian Caribbean” and develops some concepts 
about Web Ontology applications for tourism. An ontology defines the terms to use to describe and represent 
an area of knowledge. Ontologies are used by people, databases and applications that need to share a common 
information domain and include definitions of domain concepts and relations between them. The article begins 
with an analysis of the concept of ontologies, its components and some web ontology languages commonly used 
and explains how ontologies can be applied to the tourism sector. The article concludes by explaining how was 
built a seeker engine for sites based on ontologies. 
Key words: Ontology, OWL, Tourism, Searcher, Knowledge.
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Web ontology language applied to the tourism sector
89
1. Introduction 
Speaking of ontologies is impossible to think of the se-
mantic Web, which is based on the idea of adding seman-
tic metadata and ontology to the world wide web. That 
information, -which describes the content, meaning and 
the relationship between data- must be provided in a for-
mal way to human agents or automatons responsible for 
its processing.
Nowadays, Internet is a technology for daily use by all ac-
tors in society, comparable coverage to other traditional 
media such as radio, television or telephone, which are ex-
ceeded in many aspects. Internet is now an extraordinarily 
flexible and economic way of communication, trade and 
business, and entertainment, access to information and 
service offerings, among others. Internet´s growth is the 
cause of the technologies on which it is based have under-
gone rapid evolution.
Some of these technologies, which enable the semantic 
Web, including languages for representing ontologies, 
parsers, query languages, development environments, 
management modules (storage, access, update) of ontolo-
gies, display modules, ontologies convertions, and other 
tools and libraries.
The paper is organized as follows: initially it defines some 
of the basic concepts. It then provides an overview of the 
use of OWL ® (Web Ontology Language) in the tourism 
sector. Subsequently, we explore the implementation of a 
search engine based on ontologies and finally, conclusions 
are presented. 
2. Basics 
2.1.Ontology
In the context of information, a definition of “ontology” 
widely adopted is the following: An ontology is an explicit 
and formal specification of a shared conceptualization.[1].
The main function of an ontology is to represent concepts 
formally attributable to the application domain, ie, the 
portion of reality under consideration, the existing knowl-
edge. Specify the conceptualization means assigning un-
ambiguous meaning to the definition of knowledge in a 
specific domain. The shared word reflects the fact that the 
ontology captures consensual knowledge, or accepted by 
a group. 
An ontology isn’t a knowledge of the objective world, but 
represents the view shared by a group [2],[3]. It aims to 
eliminate or at least reduce, the confusion of concepts and 
terminology, to have a shared understanding [3], [4].
Usually an ontology is composed by: 
•  Concepts that describe a specific application domain, 
such as tourism, the subject of this document. 
•  Definitions of concepts, through a formal language or 
natural language. 
•  The relations between the concepts expressed through 
a formal language. Relationships can be of several ty-
pes: taxonomy (a), meronymy (part of), associations, 
etc. 
•  Generated concepts that express the main categories 
that is the world, which is the highest possible level 
of an ontology of the world. It happens in general, 
domain independent.
An ontology can occur in various forms and have differ-
ent levels of formality, but always includes a vocabulary of 
terms with the description of its meaning [5].
2.2 Components of the Ontology
Ontologies have the following components used to repre-
sent some domain knowledge [6]:
•  Concepts: These are basic ideas that try to formali-
ze. The concepts can be classes of objects, methods, 
plans, strategies, thinking processes, etc.
•  Relations: represent the interaction and liaison bet-
ween the concepts of the domain. They tend to form 
taxonomy of the domain.
•  Functions: they are a specific type of relation whe-
re one element is identified by calculating a function 
that considers several elements of the ontology.
•  Instances: used to represent objects of a certain 
 concept.
•  axioms are theorems that state relations to be satis-
fied by elements of ontology. For example: “If A and 
B are class C, then A is not subclass of B”, “For every 
A satisfying the condition C1, A is B”, etc.
These latter components -the axioms- permit, along with 
the legacy of concepts, knowledge inference that is not ex-
plicitly stated in the taxonomy of concepts.
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Prospect. Vol. 8, No. 1, Enero - Junio de 2010, págs. 87-93
Figure 1. OWL ontology language DL 
Figura 1. Ontología en el lenguaje OWL DL
2.3. Web Ontology Language
Ontologies can be developed in different languages like 
RDF ®, RDF SCHEMA ®, XML ®, XML SCHEMA ® and 
OWL ®. The latter is the most widely used because of their 
greater capacity for expressing meaning and semantics, 
OWL ® goes beyond the other languages mentioned in its 
ability to represent a computer interpretable content on 
the Web [2]. 
Currently, OWL ® has three versions ® OWL Lite, OWL 
DL and OWL Full ® ®; these versions incorporate differ-
ent functionalities. OWL Lite ® is constructed so that any 
sentence can be resolved in finite time, the most complete 
version of OWL DL ® may contain infinite”loops” and is 
based on descriptive logic, while OWL Lite ® is based on a 
less expressive logic [2]. An example of OWL ® generated 
code can be seen in Figure 1. 
3. Applied Ontology Tourism Sector 
There is research on how we describe the concepts related 
to the field of tourism in an ontology. It is clear that this 
area is broad and the boundaries are not well defined. The 
purpose of a tourism ontology is to facilitate the descrip-
tion of the attractions that are offered as a web service, 
therefore, the concepts that have been chosen to be con-
sidered are primarily hunters sights, hotels, tour operators 
and activities that can be done in a certain place [7], as 
shown in the diagram in Figure 2. 
Figure 2.Turistics Concepts of an Ontology 
Figura 2. Conceptos de una Ontología Turística
In regard to the discovery of contents to identify concepts 
in the field of tourism ontology, we studied the entire “life 
cycle” of a trip considering all the needs of a tourist. For 
this reason, we analyzed the vehicle booking services and 
facilities where tourists can stay, also services such as 
weather forecasting, route calculation, information about 
countries and cities, among others.
Some difficulties are related to certain concepts of tourism 
that are not well defined, for example, with regard to ac-
commodation, in some countries there is no national law, 
but regional standards.
To resolve these difficulties were consulted the most au-
thoritative sources identified and extracted concepts that 
were common [8]. 
During the identification and analysis of related concepts 
in the tourism domain, it concluded that it is not possible 
to isolate these other concepts that have to do with the so-
called “common sense” and are independent of particular 
domain concerned. Examples are: those related to time 
(day and date), the location of the space (place, address, 
etc.), Among others.
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Web ontology language applied to the tourism sector
91
That familiarity can be designed and connected in a differ-
ent way. If we analyze the different meanings of the terms 
used in English to describe them, it is found that a term 
that seems intuitively one-way detail in the description 
of different concepts is different from one another. It then 
becomes necessary to make decisions, trying to identify 
between the different interpretations, which are most rel-
evant to the field of tourism [8]. 
The meaning of concepts is mainly expressed through the 
definitions in natural language. For this purpose you can 
use OWL DL ®. Through this language expresses the rela-
tionships between different concepts. The use of an upper 
ontology, especially when there is extensive use of mul-
tiple inheritance, has the advantage of providing a man-
ual navigation of the ontology and therefore simplify the 
recovery of concepts that can serve as a description. The 
construction of an ontology is a task even more delicate 
than the choice of domain concepts [7], [8].
4.  Building a Search Engine Based on Ontology 
Attractions 
The traditional way to find search engine results is through 
robust text comparisons made between the sites html pag-
es already stored and indexed in its database (if the web-
site is not very important, it only saves one to two pages); 
less complex procedures search engines use the timely 
information sites (titles, keywords) as a criterion of result 
or the existence of a domain, ie, how many times it is ac-
cessed (implemented by Google). This way of handling 
the search without any ranking, but only with a reference 
plain text, creates inaccurate results in many cases [9].
The ontological search based on conceptual schemes gen-
erate consistent results with the user’s criteria on one or 
more domains of information. The domain is the set of 
concepts defined by the ontology. Here are the steps fol-
lowed for the implementation of an information domain 
created under the OWL ontology language on Colombia’s 
Caribbean tourist attractions in the web search portal “So-
mos Caribe Colombiano... Magica realidad” (“We’re Co-
lombian caribbean... Magical reality”) (www.somoscaribe. 
com) and the results obtained from this experience. 
4.1. Understanding the Concept Domain Information
Understanding the domain of the concept of information 
is the most important part in the creation of a web ontol-
ogy, in this case to have the knowledge base (ontology 
and instances of classes) already created, you must un-
derstand the conceptual framework to use. The ontologic 
editors allow to understand the concept domain easily 
adn clearly. There are various editors (swoop ®, semantic 
turkey ®, Sinaptyc ®, among others.), the tourist portal 
www.somoscaribe.com used the editor PROTEGE ® cre-
ated by Stanford University (http://protege . stanford.edu 
/), which provides great support and it is built on an open 
platform.
PROTEGE ® delivers different ways to visualize the con-
cepts and relation. These include: hierarchical tree of 
classes and subclasses of the ontology (Figure 4), plugins 
as Jambalaya ® and OWLViz ® that graphically show our 
domain (Figure 5, Figure 3).
Figure 3. Ontology Created using PROTEGE 3.4
Figura 3. Ontología creada en PROTEGE 3.4
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Prospect. Vol. 8, No. 1, Enero - Junio de 2010, págs. 87-93
Figure 4. Hierarchical tree, ontological editor PROTÉGÉ® 
Figura 4. Árbol jerárquico, editor ontológico PROTÉGÉ®
Figure 5. Domain Graphics “atractivos turísticos” con Jambalaya® OWLViz®
Figura 5. Gráficos del dominio “atractivos turísticos” con Jambalaya ® y OWLViz®
Once well-understood the domain, we must limit the im-
portant concepts to achieve the desired objective. 
4.2. Defining relevant concepts of the searches
Properly define what the essential search criteria are is 
important to create the ontological form. Placing trace 
data for properties that are irrelevant or vague can create 
inconsistent results. First of all, the purpose of the ontol-
ogy must be clear. In the case of the tourist platform, its 
purpose is to show places of interest related to the name, 
municipality or department where they are located and its 
attractive features. This allows to define relevant criteria 
for your search: 
Name of tourist attraction. 1. 
Tourist attractions in a municipality (name of muni-2. 
cipality). 
Tourist attractions in a specific department (name of 3. 
the department). 
Tourist attraction synonyms (used in cases like Ba-4. 
rranquilla and whose synonym is Puerta de Oro). 
A brief deescription of the tourist attraction. 5. 
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Web ontology language applied to the tourism sector
93
These are the 5-managed search criteria in the search for 
attractions and they are classified according to a range of 
importance. Within the ontology of tourist attractions are 
other properties of the instance (Expanded descriptions, 
date and time of care) that are not that important or they 
can create less accurate results. 
4.3. Using Tools for Ontological Management 
The management of the ontology should be done through 
a tool to create the conceptual schema in memory, to rea-
soning, data query, modify and create new relation or con-
cepts, among other processes. An appropiate Framework 
is JENA ® from Java platform, which in its API (applica-
tion programming interface) it contains different types of 
reasoners and various types of variables for the manage-
ment of ontologies, such as ontmodel containing the ontol-
ogy loaded into memory , or ontProperties for properties. 
It also enables the use of query languages in the semantic 
web (SPARQL ®), as shown in Figure6. 
4.4. Query Generation through language SPARQL 
To manage and query data in an ontology was used SPAR-
QL ® (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language). The 
basic building block of a query SPARQL ® is a triplet pat-
tern. A triplet can have variables in place of springs in 
any of these three positions, subject, predicate and object. 
The variables are shown as symbols preceded by a special 
character:? [10].
Figure 6. Ontology and reasoners in JENA
Figura 6. Ontología y razonadores en JENA
 
An example of the ontology of turistics sites is: 
 
PREFIX st: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
SELECT ?Names
WHERE (
?sites st: name ?Names
)
You can see the syntax used by SPARQL ®. The PREFIX is 
used to store a URL that will reference an ontology, in this 
case is on the tourist attractions and have the prefix st. SE-
LECT is the data to be returned by the search, in our case 
all the names of the attractions or tourist sites. WHERE are 
the conditions to be met for data to be in the results.
In general, you can define the query as: what objects (? 
Sites) that are within the ontology of sites have a name 
(dc: name) either (said to be either because the property is 
preceded by a variable ?Names) . The result could be:
Nombres
“El Rodadero”
“Parque Tayrona”
“El Hoyo soplador”
The results from SPARQL ® are just a literal type, ie only 
the data that have been inserted to instances of classes. 
5. Conclusions 
It could be observed that the tourism sector is an area in 
which ontologies can be applied anywhere. Its use is suit-
able for the development of automated services to users 
such as the specific case of tourism services. 
There are currently several systems and prototypes that 
offer tourist services such as restaurants or museums. In 
these cases the services are usually treated independently 
and not integrated, as it would be if we use web ontolo-
gies. 
The ontology-based search is an important step for gener-
ating more accurate results and higher levels of accuracy 
in the information, this applies to tourist domains. The use 
and investment in the development of ontology languages 
promises a convinient future [11]. 
Remarkably, we can say that there are well-developed on-
tologies in the internet created and improved by differ-
ent people, which can be used for multiple purposes, the 
proposal is to organize a single universal domain and that 
contains other domains together in order to create a com-
plete scheme of all the information on the web. 
The main advantages of this new Internet revolution 
will be the development of applications with common 
data schemas and finding information with inference. To 
achieve these purposes is required to unify the semantic 
content using ontologies to formalize this knowledge in a 
consensus and reusable way. We need a web-based com-
mon language with sufficient expressive and reasoning 
power to represent the semantics of ontologies. 
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Prospect. Vol. 8, No. 1, Enero - Junio de 2010, págs. 87-93
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Lenguajes de ontologías web aplicados al sector turístico

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Lenguajes de ontologías web aplicados al sector turístico

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